Blame Mason for encouraging me in this terrible exercise of mortifying indulgence.

Perhaps in response to the eleventh Doctor's history of physically and emotionally harrowing adventures, the twelfth Doctor is reclusive, misanthropic, and unwilling to adapt his routine to outside forces. He is of average height, but weighs some twenty stone. He rarely, if ever, leaves the Tardis, preferring to send his companions to gather information for him or to bring people to him.

His overriding concern, or at least his professed concern, is the breeding of champion roses. Many of his adventures have their genesis in his quest for unusual varieties of rose or his contacts with other exotic rose fanciers across space and time.

Because he is reluctant to leave the Tardis, and utterly unconcerned with anyone else's apparently sensible reasons for him to leave the Tardis, we see more of its interior than has been routine. In particular, we see the greenhouse, where the Doctor's roses are tended, the library, and the dining room. The Doctor maintains a strict routine, moving from room to room and task to task according to an internal compulsion that can cause him to drop a conversation mid-sentence in order to move on to the next item on his schedule.

The Doctor isn't agoraphobic; he is simply uninterested in any problem that cannot be brought directly to him. It is because of this that the twelfth Doctor maintains one of the largest active stables of companions in the character's history.

The first and by far most important companion is Randall, Lord Bontriomphe, a Norman nobleman from 13th century England. Randall, who is thoroughly competent in his own right and unflappable, even glib, regardless of the circumstances or the odds, is the Doctor's right-hand man. He "goes and finds out" information for the Doctor's use, or brings people back to the Tardis for the Doctor to interview, guided in these by his native intelligence and by the experience he's gained traveling with the Doctor.

Randall is as physically capable as the Doctor is not, able to end many dangerous situations with an unexpectedly fast blow. He is charming and socially deft, able to conduct himself appropriately both above and below stairs. He is particularly attractive to women, and enjoys their company; the Doctor, who in this regeneration verges on the misogynistic, often relies on Randall's supposed ability to get women to do whatever he wants.

We also see much of the Doctor's cook, an android named Chef-Paixroi, an expert in Continental cuisine, with whom the Doctor argues constantly over the exact amount and combination of flavors and spices.

A recurring character, who counts as a companion due to occasional trips in the Tardis, is Leo Sol (a pseudonym), a time traveller who can find anything, no matter who hid it or how. Regularly engaged in his own affairs, he will drop whatever he's doing to aid the Doctor.

Many of the twelfth Doctor's adventures take place during the First Bountiful Human Empire; it is in this time that Randall's favorite girlfriend dwells. Encountered during one of the Doctor's rare trips outside the Tardis, Alder Lilac is an heiress, the only daughter of a poor man who built a fortune building spatial hyperpasses during the rise of the Empire. She is easily Randall's equal in wit, and the two enjoy baiting each other. Initially somewhat indolent and uninterested in making a good impression, she takes her attraction to Randall as a challenge to improve herself, and also to become one of the few women that the twelfth Doctor would respect.

The Doctor often works in cooperation with, or, at least, with compatible ends as, the 51st century's equivalent of UNIT, the Imperial Special Intelligence Service, led by Inspector-Executive Marchant and his chief assistant Leftenant Stumpfield. The Doctor seems to take great pleasure in frustrating Marchant and Stumpfield, but invariably ends up solving their problems for them.

Many of the twelfth Doctor's adventures have titles that fall into a set of phrasal templates. For example, "The X Hunt", where the Doctor must typically find out who X is, or where they are concealed. Examples include:

• "The Royal Hunt": The Doctor must determine who among a group of pretenders is the rightful heir to a royal throne.
• "The Daughter Hunt": The Doctor must backtrack along his daughter's trail in order to figure out her motives in who's she helping and why.
• "The Granddaughter Hunt": Susan Foreman is stolen as an infant, and the Doctor must return her to Earth before his first self learns of the abduction.

Another phrasal template for episode titles is "Too Many X". Typically, among a crowd of like people who seemingly share the same agenda, the Doctor must unravel the threads of individuality that have led to murder. "Too Many Timelords", "Too Many Doctors", and "Too Many Diplomats" are the most highly regarded.

The most notorious set of twelfth Doctor adventures is a trilogy of two-part episodes in which the Doctor first brushes paths with and then sets out to destroy Omega, the leader of a time and space-spanning criminal enterprise.

• "And Be a Monster": A series of poisonings brings the Doctor into contact with a ring of mind-controlling commercial executives. Omega warns him off, but the Doctor finds the poisoner, who's unconnected with the mind-control ring; Omega congratulates him on his good sense.
• "The Second Admission": The Doctor must force his quarry to reveal the same secret twice, in the process again coming into unwelcome contact with Omega's syndicate. In order to impress the seriousness of the matter upon him, Omega strikes at the Tardis with a subdimensional resonance that shatters every pot in the Doctor's rose garden.
• "In the Best Circumstances": This two-parter has a cliffhanger ending that extends over a season break, the first such in Doctor Who history. In the first part, the Doctor sends Randall to deal with a monster attack, only to receive the most directly threatening warning from Omega yet. When Randall returns to the Tardis, he finds it empty, gone, with no sign of the Doctor. Six months later, in the second part, Lord Bontriomphe has developed his own consultancy and is enjoying considerable, if somewhat unexciting, suceess when he is contacted by Omega. As ever curious, he agrees to a meeting with Omega's man, only to find out it is the Doctor in disguise. He's lost more than five stone and grown a beard, but he has infiltrated Omega's organization and the time has come to bring it down for good, with Randall's help. The six month gap was necessary for the Doctor's actor to actually execute the needed physical changes through crash dieting and extensive exercise; he remarked that his first bite of boeuf au buerre noire after wrapping part two (and after six months of rice cakes) was the closest he'd ever come to a truly transcendental experience.